Results of the Eclipse Community Survey

The Eclipse Foundation has conducted a survey in order to discover statistical details about its members: the OS used while developing, the primary database or the main deployment application server, and other information like the level of satisfaction using Eclipse.

Methodology

The survey was promoted through eclipse.org, Eclipse Foundation newsgroup, a blog post on PlanetEclipse and a few tweets during April 14 and May 15, 2009. The survey was addressed to English speaking users and it is biased towards Eclipse users, but any user could take the survey. 1,365 respondents completed the survey.

Most of the users, 53.8%, were programmers, while 17.7% of them were System Architects and 11.5% were Development Managers.

Regarding the industries they are working in, the high-tech manufacturing sector and the professional services sector represent 50%.

Results

Operating System. A notable result shown by the survey is that for OS used while developing in Eclipse, Windows comes down 10% compared with 2007 results, while Linux climbs 7%. Windows is still the OS of choice with 64% while Linux accounts for 27%. The predominant Linux distribution is Ubuntu with 14.5%. Mac OS X number of users has doubled to 6.9% from 3.5% in 2007.

IDE. The most popular IDE among Eclipse users is Eclipse JDT, 60%, followed by Eclipse PHP Development Tools, 12.6%, and C/C++ Developer Tools, 6.3%. 80% of the respondents say they are using a secondary IDE.

Source Code Management. The predominant SCM tool is Subversion followed by CVS.

Change Management System. 22.7% respondents are not using any CMS tool. From those who are using one, Bugzilla and JIRA share the first place at about 17% each.

Database. MySQL and Oracle are each used as primary database in about 27% of the cases. Considering the recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle, it results that Oracle accounts for more than 50% of the DB installations for Eclipse users.

Application Server. Apache Tomcat is leader with 34.8%, but a large number of users, 25.3% do not use an application server.

Open Source Maturity. This means how many open source products are used by the companies the respondents work for and how much they contribute with code to those products. According to the survey analysis:

In 2007, 46% were allowed to use OSS but could not contribute back; now this group
has decreased to only 27%. In contrast, 48.2% of respondents are now allowed by their
company to use and contribute back to OSS communities—a significant increase from
37% in 2007. How much OSS impacts an organization has changed as well. 15.6% of
respondents report that their organization relies on OSS as a business model, an
increase from 10% in 2007.

Satisfaction. This shows the overall level of satisfaction in using Eclipse. 89.1%, a very large percentage, are either satisfied or very satisfied using Eclipse.

In many cases, Eclipse is perceived as an IDE, but actually Eclipse is an “open source community with over 100 open source projects, 1,000 committers, 170 member companies, thousands of companies embedding Eclipse into products and applications and million of users.“